Music Licensing Success Another Placement Round Up Post

Here’s another music licensing update for you. These results are a culmination of library and direct connections I’ve come in contact with through my run with a music licensing course.

Which licensing course? The 90 Day Music Licensing Challenge

Before continuing with this post, I strongly recommend that you get familiar with The Music Licensing Case Study or at least book mark it. What started out as a simple case study, has become a licensing resource for most and I know you’ll benefit greatly from it.

Without further ado, here are my licensing activities from January 2014 until May 2014.

Placements From Music Licensing Companies

January 2014 – Probably one of the most annoying months thus far. 1.05.14, I saw a pending transaction in my Paypal for the amount $500.00. A few days later the transaction fails.

1.17.14 I get another pending payment transaction for the same amount and again, within a few days it dropped.

Tried contacting the email connected with the sender, no response. Contacted Paypal, they were only able to give me the main company’s name, still no luck with a response.

On the plus side of things, I did make around $200.00 from other libraries.

February 2014 – $237.13 This is the result of sells coming from 7 or 8 royalty free music libraries. The good thing is, there’s some money going into the PayPal account.

The bad thing is, I have no idea who the clients are which kills my chances of follow up and possibly landing future placements with the client(s).

March 2014 – One library, 4 music cues, $53.42 after splits and fees. Not an exciting month, but it’s something. I’m sure some will look at libraries as a waste of time, but keep in mind, this all adds up.

The more music you have in libraries, the greater you increase your chances.

April 2014 – No commissions this month. Why is this? There’s no way of knowing for sure, but here are my theories.

I might not have what the client’s are looking for

Decrease in traffic to the music library?

I believe this may have something to do with a huge amount of servers shutting down for 48 – 72 hours. Justhost, BlueHost and HostGator are all under the same umbrella and when one has issues, they all do.

If you follow my twitter you may have noticed me complaining along side other users. I’m sure some of you are thinking okay your site was down for little bit so what.

What you fail to realize is a lot of people make a full-time income online. Everything from the CS to the delivery is online. So for stuff to be down for 24 hours, even 5 hours, that’s a lot money missed!

Then it hit me, how many libraries are using these guy’s as hosts and how much traffic have they lost due to the outage?

No site access = no licenses = no money for us music creators.

May 2014 – Things are picking up a little bit. In total I made $182.96 after splits and PayPal fees. There we also more pending transactions which felt déjà vu like, but they are from a company I recognize and have been paid from before.

Placements From Direct Connections

January 2014 – I spent most this month conducting meetings, trying to tie up loose ends and get the ball moving on some of these video game/sound projects.

For the synthesis project, the negotiation was for $800 with 25% of that being up font.. My original deadline was March, but later pushed to May.

Right now, we’re arranging time for quality assurance which is another way of saying quality-control. Everything should be wrapped up in June.

As far as the video game project… I did collect my down payment and was able to get my hands on a beta version of the game, but I had a lot of problems getting it to work.

It required me to root my android device. I’ve never rooted anything before and didn’t want to take any chances, so I settled for in game video footage.

Total = upfront $475.00 (both projects)

February/March 2014 – Work, revisions, re-negotiations and brainstorming. I try to get an in depth idea of what my clients are trying to do as a whole, even if it’s outside of my scope or the project at hand.

As a result, I’m being offered an audio editing gig that’s contingent on the finalization my current gaming project.

Total = 0.00

April/May 2014 – Two words Project overload!

In business they’ll be times when things move slow. You’ll feel as if you’re not progressing and then out of nowhere WHAM, everything hits you at once.

In a nutshell, May was the month of outsourcing. I’ll dive deeper into this before the end of the month, but before that, get familiar with a post titled music libraries are biased.

Now, If you’ve been following this case study this post is not new, but it’s the prerequisite for what’s to come, so read it again :).

Closing Comments

If you like this post, please let me know by leaving a comment. Or, if you have questions, you can leave those below as well. I try my best to get to everyone’s questions, sometimes it takes longer than expected. Hope you have a great day.

Do you/the readers have a list of Music Libraries and/or RF sites that work better for you? I appreciate it’s dependent on personal music styles & timing etc but I’ve found there are ones that seem to work better than others.

Hi Greg, I have no idea what to do with any of my original songs, whether it’s instrumental or vocals? I don’t know how to even sell or present my songs to anyone? How do I do it? Can you help me out? A VERY REJECTED SONGWRITER? Thanks, Sam Scola

Long time no see my friend. How have you been? As stated many times on the site, in order to sell your original music you have to find a market for it. You also have to understand how music licensing works and what clients are looking for. I have outlined in this many times in the music licensing case study which you can find here